Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 3-2-2006 Mating call Andrew Cohen Florida International University DOI: 10.25148/etd.FI14060866 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Cohen, Andrew, "Mating call" (2006). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2399. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2399 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida MATING CALL A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS in CREATIVE WRITING by Andrew Cohen 2006 To: Interim Dean Mark Szuchman College of Arts and Sciences This thesis, written by Andrew Cohen, and entitled Mating Call, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgment. We have read this thesis and recommend that it be approved. Meri-Jane Rochelson Les Standiford- Dan Wakefield, Major Professor Date of Defense: March 2, 2006 The thesis of Andrew Cohen is approved. Interim Dean Mark Szuchman College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Stephan L. Mintz University Graduate School Florida International University, 2006 ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS MATING CALL by Andrew Cohen Florida International University, 2006 Miami, Florida Professor Dan Wakefield, Major Professor Mating Call is a memoir set in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s, in what Spin Magazine calls "Seattle's Golden Age." The story begins with my arrival in the West and a self-inflicted broken heart, a relationship I had severed due to "missing pieces." The quest is to find these pieces, and throughout the search the memoir analyzes love and relationships for Generation X. The quest takes seven years, during which the narrative explores Seattle's breweries and bedrooms, and the Northwest's rainforests and volcanoes, all the while investigating interpersonal chemistry, sex, and friendship. For all the searching, the missing pieces are actually discovered by accident, when happenstance deals my heart a second blow; the quest is over, and I return East. TABLE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. D O W N ON TH E U SI ....................................................................................... 1 . LITH IU M ............................................................................................................... 5 3. L E Y ....................................................................................................... 69 4. M A D ONN A ......................................................................................................... 166 iv Chapter 1 Down on the Upside We went to the Sip-and-Sail because someone in our dorm knew the bouncer, knew that he wouldn't confiscate our fake IDs. It was my first semester in a small college town in Upstate New York. We were high and drunk. The bar was packed with too many people, no room to move, bodies pressing against bodies, few able to order drinks. I managed to raise my money above my head without elbowing the guy next to me, but I was invisible to the bartender, like a fan at a concert. The girl in front of me placed her palm on my stomach and slipped her hand down my jeans; she grabbed my dick and said, "I want to flck you." I turned to my roommate to ask his advice, to get a second buzzed opinion on her looks, and he said, "I'd do her. She's good to go." So off we went. I was 19 and didn't have much sexual experience, only a year's worth with the girl I'd lost my virginity to, a high school junior in my hometown who was gaining wads of experience in my absence. I wasn't exactly what you'd call a ladies' man-I had spent my teenage Friday and Saturday nights playing Dungeons and Dragons in my basement-but this college of mine had a 5:1 girl:guy ratio, odds that offset the foot in my mouth. Some girls from down the hall came to party in our suite room, playing quarters with Genny Cream, people laughing and passing out, I ended up with the blonde in my bed. The next night more of the same, except it was Miller Hi Life and the girls from upstairs, and I was horizontal again, staring into the black eyes of a half-Japanese girl. Two weeks later to the day, this girl's sister knocks on my door, and I'm already in bed 1 asleep, but she wakes me up and tells me it's her birthday, and she climbs in and we get naked and do it with my roommate passed out in the upper bunk. This was all in my first month, September 1987. The next year we moved off-campus, closer to the bars, a large house acting as a way station for drunken girls not wanting to make the trek back to their dorms. Like my friends, I'd had girl fends, flings, stalkers, and one-night stands. One girl, born on 2/13/70-night of our most revered Dead show-followed me from bar to bar until finally insisting that she walk me home. She slipped out of her denim skirt and onto me, and after some drunk sex but before I could pass out she said, "You're not done with me are you?" I suggested that it was up to her, and she blew the life back into me, and we had sex until sunrise. She took it in the ass. She let me take pictures of her nude, black- and-white, and I used these for my photography class' gallery exhibit. She had soft white skin and made a killer lasagna. It wasn't like I was some stud or anything, just lucky. In Dungeons and Dragons terms, on the scale of abilities that ranged from 3 to 18-with 18 being the top of human capability in strength, intelligence, charisma-I was a 12. High on the average side. But this college, this town, was the right place right time. By my senior year I had four girlfriends, all of whom knew each other or of each other. On my birthday, the month before graduation, I had sex with all four. Not at the same time, and not within the confines of the 24-hour anniversary of my birth, but spread out over the two-and-half-day celebration. And then school ended. Where does a 20-something guy go after an experience like that? I went to New York City, to optometry school, and I met girls in bars and girls in class and girls in elevators. But something didn't sit right. Maybe it was 2 a lack of growth. I developed this nervous rash, my body's way of telling me what my mind could not: I was moving in the wrong direction, sideways, not forward. I dropped out of grad school after one year and worked two jobs, saving up to backpack through Europe. I sublet my Manhattan apartment and moved home to Long Island. And there, one night, I ran into two high school friends at a bar, a couple. "You've got to call Ariana when she gets back," my friend said when mentioned that I planned to go to Europe in two months. The girl-half of the couple was Ariana's sister. They had both just returned from visiting her in France. "She's studying abroad, finishing her last semester in Paris." He told me about all the great things they saw, the Louvre, the Eiffel, whatever, but I tuned him out and pictured Ariana, wondering if her brown hair still reached the small of her back. Ariana was the first girl I had ever fooled around with: she let me get up her shirt during our long first kiss. I was 16, Ariana was 14. Her sister and I were the same age and it was at her sister's party, parents out of town, my Road Crew buddies and everyone else passed out all over their house. I helped Ariana clean up somewhere between midnight and sunrise, gathering beer cans and dumping ashtrays. It took me a million years to make the move, to lean in for the kiss-she was way too pretty for me-and we kissed for hours on the living room couch while friends snored at our feet. I don't know why we never said anything about that night, why we didn't see each other again outside of the high school hallways. I never knew what to say to girls. I was a senior the next year, involved with someone else and attempting to lose my virginity, and I left town for college after that, and we didn't see each other again for seven years, until she returned from France. I waited a day before calling. We were on 3 the phone for hours when I said, "This is ridiculous, we could talk all night without stopping, and you're less than two miles away-I'm coming to pick you up." We drove around aimlessly and finally parked at Roxton, the one stretch of street in our town that didn't have houses on it, a high school rendezvous for partiers and a makeout point for couples. We continued talking, about Europe and college and about who we were still in touch with from the old days, but this time it only seemed a half-million years before I leaned in for our second kiss. We unclipped the seatbelts and fooled around until dawn, an occasional teen speeding by, honking a horn.